Events in the world continue to astound. Starving, desperate Venezuela is supposedly so pleased with Nicholas Maduro that they have elected him to another term as president dictator, so they can starve longer. In Turkey, Recip Erdogan has apparently decided to be a dictator. And China’s President Xi Jinping also serves as General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, and the Communist Party has decided to allow him to reign indefinitely, instead of the two terms he originally planned on.

American democracy is unwell; on this much, President Trump’s detractors can agree.

But when they turn to the tasks of identifying our republic’s symptoms, naming its illness, and writing a prescription, different factions of “the resistance” produce divergent diagnoses.

One group — comprised of comparative politics scholars, liberal pundits, and NeverTrump conservatives — have their eyes fixed on Donald Trump. They see the moral cowardice of a Republican elite that declined to deny an illiberal demagogue their nomination, or to abandon him in the general election, or to let the investigation into his campaign proceed unimpeded. They observe a president who relentlessly assails the independence of federal law enforcement,veracity of official election results and a conservative base that takes his lies to be self-evident. And, pulsing beneath it all, they discern the rise of a hyperpartisanship that’s leading each party’s elected officials to eviscerate informal constraints on their authority — and each party’s voters, to believe that the other side has no legitimate claim to power.

It’s quite clear that when he writes about ‘capitalism’ and ‘democracy’ he is not writing about anything familiar to us. Capitalism is to do with corporations which are evil, I won’t even attempt to explain his delusions, you’ll have to read it for yourself. But it becomes clearer just why it often seems like we are speaking different languages. We are.

Extreme poverty in the world fell to 15% in 2011, from 36% in 1990. The credit goes to the spread of capitalism. The past 25 years have witnessed the greatest reduction in global poverty in the history of the world. An 80% reduction in world poverty in only 36 years.

The World Bank reported on Oct. 9 that the share of the world population living in extreme poverty had fallen to 15% in 2011 from 36% in 1990. Earlier this year, the International Labor Office reported that the number of workers in the world earning less than $1.25 a day has fallen to 375 million 2013 from 811 million in 1991. …

The reduction in world poverty has attracted little attention because it runs against the narrative pushed by those hostile to capitalism. The Michael Moores of the world portray capitalism as a degrading system in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Yet thanks to growth in the developing world, world-wide income inequality—measured across countries and individual people—is falling, not rising, as Branco Milanovic of City University of New York and other researchers have shown.

So what accounts for that? “It was globalization, free trade, the boom in international entrepreneurship. In short, it was the free enterprise system, American style, which is our gift to the world.

Freedom and opportunity make all the difference. Some people just can’t grasp the idea of freedom, they can only see a world that would be better if only they were in charge.